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January 9th, 2010
Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood is a moron.
Last week Bakersfield airport was temporarily shut down when a passenger was caught trying to go through security with a “suspicious substance.” The substance turned out to be homemade honey which the passenger, a gardener, was taking home to relatives as a gift. Instead of giving it a quick taste and saying “mmm, honey,” airport officials had it chemically analyzed and two of them said they were “sickened” by the smell. They were taken to the hospital and immediately released by doctors who probably thought “get out of here, you paranoid hypochondriacs.”
However, even after it was proved that the substance in the jars was honey and that the passenger was, in fact, a legal resident of the U.S. (his last name is Ramirez – extremely suspicious), Sheriff Youngblood tried to blame the airport’s closure on the passenger. “Why, in this day and age, would someone take a chance carrying honey in Gatorade bottles? That in itself is an alarm. It’s hard to understand.” Let us examine those sentences one at a time.
1. Why Gatorade bottles? Why not? What does Sheriff Youngblood have against Gatorade? Should Ramirez have printed up labels that said “Homemade Honey – Contains No Explosives?” Would Youngblood have been happier if the bottles had previously contained ketchup or laundry detergent?
2. That in itself is an alarm. No, it’s not.
3. It’s hard to understand. Only because you are a moron.
That, unfortunately, was not the only incident last week where airport security freaked out and caused needless delays.
At Newark airport, a man who was trying to get into the departure area to say good-bye to his girlfriend ducked out of line while the guard was away for a moment, and walked on through. He was not a terrorist. He was not even a passenger.
Nonetheless, airport authorities closed the terminal for 7 hours, rerouting numerous flights, causing delays for hundreds of passengers and costing the airlines huge amounts of money. The non-passenger, a Chinese graduate student at Rutgers University, has been arrested.
At Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, whose toilet was made famous by Idaho Senator Larry Craig, a sniffer dog determined that one bag was suspicious. The odd part is, it didn’t belong to a passenger at all. It was a bag that airline employees used as a marker, a signal to other employees that all the bags from a flight had been unloaded. With no passenger to blame, this one hasn’t been in the news as much.
One more great quote from Sheriff Youngblood. “It could be honey. It could be honey mixed with something else.” I wonder if Sheriff Youngblood has ever read Winnie the Pooh.
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